On the last day of my last job, the site secretary Michelle stopped me and quoted some Zen philosophy at me. I don't remember her exact words but she told me something like;

"The branch of a tree does not fight the wind, but bends with it instead."

I felt she was telling me that I had resisted the will of the company and I had been rejected as a result.
I think she was trying to help me, but at the time I dismissed it and I didn't know why. Looking back now, I believe that she was wrong in metaphysical terms and in analogy terms.

Only the branch of a dead tree offers little wind resistance, but it is dead. A healthy living tree with many leaves will offer as much resitance as there are leaves. It will resist the wind as much as it can without breaking.

Here I think is the key to the analogy. The tree represents me, and its branches; my life. The wind does not represent the will of the company, but the will of all things bad. A breaking branch is an end and a beginning. To resist the will of the company is to have leaves extended and to bend with the wind. The fight is not just with the company but with all manner of bad things in life. If the fight is too great, the branch will break, but will not kill the tree as it has others. Only if all branches are broken does the tree die.

So to put this into context, I was given a false warning. I was told to avoid breakages, that they are bad. This is fear of life, surely?To submit to the wind may be advantageous but it also enslaves. To fight it brings life and freedom, if a breakage happens you can always grow another branch.

The flow of the universe is something bigger, it's will is not to always submit to the wind. The wind will come and go, it may be light or may at times be a hurricane. If you follow the will of the universe you are living a life free from worry about what the wind is doing to you and whether your branches will brake.